I seem to remember a free software map that you could get display various cities. Is there a way to merge this software with a database of locations to get it to show all the locations with hand-crafted population-size markers to show where people are concentrated? It would be pretty cool to be able to click on a location (say NYC, Minneapolis, or Atlanta, or Sweden, or wherever) and find out the contact info for people in that area.
This relates to a fairly important "guerrilla organizing" tactic that I think we should be making use of. Namely, we should have trusted "leadership" personel working in various places around the world. These people can go talk to local people who we have messages for (for example, if we had a contact at Stanford, this person could probably arrange to speak with Knuth). The map could be used to depict this kind of "leadership structure" in an easy to understand graphical way.
--jcorneli
Do it as a Google Maps hack! For example, there's the cheap gas Google Maps Hack. One could probably use this guy's code and feed in different coordinates (i.e., of people).
--akrowne Sun Jun 5 18:55:52 UTC 2005
I'm almost certainly not going to do it that way… Google maps requires javascript, which I don't like; it isn't free software, which I don't like. I made a simple example with Xearth that I think is just fine. Aside from the fact that the Xearth display isn't hypertexted (unlike page images in Noosphere which are), this seems pretty much sufficient. I think it would be easy enough to use Xearth - the only trick is to get the latitude/longitude data, and to look it up by placename, and I suppose that isn't much of a trick at all. Adding hypertext output to Xearth might be even more tricky, but the rest of the web interface is probably very easy to write.
Here's the example I produced with the following data: view from here.
45.07 -93.38 "Minneapolis" 33.65 -84.42 "Atlanta" 40.77 -73.98 "New York" 19.42 -101.07 "Morelia" 32.12 -110.93 "Tucson" 60.36 22.18 "Vahto" 42.37 -71.03 "Boston" 44.55 -69.632 "Waterville" 37.75 -122.68 "San Francisco" -22.54 -43.14 "Rio de Janeiro"
--jcorneli Sun Jun 05 21:35:32 2005
What you did looks nice.
I am very attracted to lightweight, platform-agnostic, web-based applications these days.
I don't really see Google as "closed". Google the application is implemented in a closed manner, yes, but the APIs or interfaces to the Google services are sufficiently open that you can build upon them in a way Google never thought of.
In terms of Google Maps, its unlikely any of us would really want to run the application locally, so as a web service, it is pretty open and useful.
Anyway, it doesn't matter much, as long as the end result is the same (people can see a visual rendering of where project contributors are). It looks like you've basically got the system built, though – what is left to be done?
--akrowne Mon Jun 6 01:25:56 UTC 2005
Associate names to the locations :) --rspuzio 5 June 2005
Hypertext markers instead of text markers in the picture would be nice, though they aren't especially lightweight, and they aren't really necessary.
We could also provide that info separately (e.g. with a pull-down menu that allows you to select from an alphabetized list of cities with appended parenthetical headcounts) and just use a non-clickable map to display the number of users in a given area.
For a minimally working solution, we'd want
This is pretty darn light-weight and platform agnostic. And if we go this route, it shouldn't be too hard to finish!
I also worry that the display might get somewhat crowded (even just the names of 70 cities in the default Xearth display are a bit overlapped) so perhaps something should be done to allow people to filter names out?
As for Google, I think that web services should provide their source code and if they aren't likely to be used on other servers for one reason or another, pathways for in situ modification should be set up. I have to allow myself to hold a few extreme views! :) --jcorneli Mon Jun 06 06:59:40 2005 UTC
Actually I think we could use the MAP program (which generates PM's hyperlinked page images) to hyperlinkify Xearth output, perhaps with some minor tweaking.
I'm not sure what good your web services idea would do, except set up contention for who gets to control the state of a single instance system. For instance, if someone commits a change to Noosphere that I dont like or don't want to run as a part of PM, I will make sure to roll it back in the running instance, which I control (someone has to).
--akrowne Mon Jun 6 14:21:04 UTC 2005
One added issue for the Xearth output is that you may have overlapping text. Implementing a hyperlinked version of this seems somewhat high-tech. Maybe more challenging than page images. A non-hypertexted version combined with a hypertext (but not map-based) location browser would end up accomplishing the same ends, basically, and would be more browser independent (e.g. one can't really use page images with Lynx). So, I think we could just go for a simple display. If you can send me the location array from the PM database, I'll hunt around for corresponding (and setwise-containing) latitude/longitude data and write some code to create maps given this input. (One problem I ran into at Cycorp was that people would write locations in different ways, so you sometimes need a location parser! - hopefully things won't be that complicated here.) The only thing we'd want after that would be a web interface, which I assume you could write later. We can continue up discussion of the webservices stuff at merits and demerits of non-free webservices if you like.
--jcorneli Mon Jun 06 17:01:50 2005 UTC
Note also that google maps has legal restrictions so masher-b-ware: http://slashdot.org/articles/05/06/08/203208.shtml?tid=217&tid=1 --jcorneli
